WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005.
WAWA is dedicated to confronting media and governments that shield the whole
truth.

We who Are Wide
Awake are compelled by the "fierce urgency of Now" [Rev MLK, Jr.] to raise
awareness and promote the human dialogue about many of the crucial issues of our
day: the state of our Union and in protection of democracy, what life is like
under military occupation in Palestine, the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land,
and spirituality-from a Theologically Liberated Christian Anarchist
POV.

"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."George Washington's Farewell Address - 1796

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. -July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence

February 3, 2010: Smoking Guns and Bulls-eyes: Israel rewrote the rules of War for Gaza

On February 3, 2010,The Independentreported that a high-ranking officer who served as a commander during
Operation Cast Lead, admitted that Israel’s army went beyond its previous rules
of engagement on the protection of civilian lives and “that he did not regard
the longstanding principle of military conduct known as ‘means and intentions’–
whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to
use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire
from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter.” [1]

A junior officer described the new policy as one of
"literally zero risk to the soldiers.” [Ibid]

That gun has been smoking since July 2009,
when 54 testimonies from Israeli soldiers regarding their experiences during
Operation Cast Lead were published by the Israeli human rights group, Breaking
the Silence, exposed the gaps between the reports given by the army in January
2009 and “accepted practices; the destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques
for no military purpose, the firing of phosphorous gas in the direction of
populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the
destruction of private property, and most of all, a permissive atmosphere in
the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions.”
[2]

Their testimonies illuminated that the
soldiers were not given directives regarding the goal of the operation and, one
soldier testified, "there was not much said about the issue of innocent
civilians."

Many soldiers said that they fought without seeing "the enemy before their
eyes."

Another said, "You feel like an
infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them, a
20-year-old kid should not have to do these kinds of things to other
people."

Mikhael Manekin, was discharged from the IDF in 2002 and is now the Foreign
Relations Manager for Breaking The Silence/BTS.

In July 2009, Maniken fired and hit the
bull’s-eye when he stated, "The testimonies prove that the immoral way the
war was carried out was due to the systems in place and not the individual
soldier...through the IDF the exception becomes the norm, and this requires a deep
and reflective discussion. This is an urgent call to Israel's society and
leadership to take a sober look at the foolishness of our policies."

On August 8, 2009, Rob Lipton reported that
Netanyahu asked Spain, Britain and The Netherlands to stop funding Breaking The
Silence, which is made up of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied
territories over the last ten years.

“The accounts by the soldiers are harrowing
and document war crimes. The Israeli government claims that governmental
support of ‘politicized’ NGOs undermines democracy in the Jewish state [and] that
foreign governmental funding of non-governmental institutions that are
ostensibly working ‘against’ the interests of the duly elected government are
undemocratic.” [3]

Don Futterman, program director of the
Moriah Fund, a private American foundation working in Israel to support civil
society and democracy, immigrant absorption and education, hit another
bull’s-eye:

“If our defense minister (Avigor Lieberman)
wants us to live up to the claim that the IDF is ‘the most moral army on
earth,’ he should welcome soldiers who speak out about illegal acts that they
have witnessed or were asked to perform. In our post-war rush to elections, we
unfortunately - and perhaps, conveniently - skipped over any discussion
concerning the morality of what the army has done. But even our fears of
one-sided international condemnation of our actions in Gaza cannot justify
official attempts to silence the messenger, especially when that messenger is
us.”

Don Futterman also argued that, “BTS is not an advocacy organization, it is
made up of IDF reservists who have served in the territories during their
regular military service over the last nine years. In addition to recognizing
the harm we are doing to our Palestinian neighbors, the organization urges us
to look closely at the damage we are doing to our own soldiers when they are
asked to engage in acts of questionable morality or legality. BTS gathers and
then publicizes testimony in both words and pictures from soldiers who are
willing to come forward. The organization makes every effort to check the
veracity of these testimonies, and will not publish any soldier’s comments
unless it has corroborating testimony from at least one other reliable source.

“[What] the government and the IDF find
intolerable [is] opposition to their attempts to control the discourse
concerning Israel’s behavior in the territories.

“Our government (Israel) should welcome
other expressions of foreign support for our civil society, not attempt to
control it. If the United Kingdom or Spain or any other state wants to be a
true friend to Israeli democracy, it will renew its commitment to BTS.”

Bans on foreign government support of NGOs
is a characteristic of dictatorships, and Israel was never a democracy, but has
always been an Ethnocracy:

"An
ethnocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some
elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arises
when one particular group-the Jews in Israel, the Russians in Russia, the
Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland, the whites in apartheid South Africa,
the Shi’ite Muslims in Iran, the Malay in Malaysia and, if they had their way,
the white Christian fundamentalists in the US-seize control of the government
and armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other
groups in what is in fact a multi-ethnic or multi-religious society.
Ethnocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos, whereby one’s
ethnic affiliation, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or
national origin, takes precedence over citizenship in determining to whom a
county actually 'belongs.-Jeff Halper,An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting
Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, Page 74.

"The
terms ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ are totally absent from the Declaration of
Independence. This is not an accident. The intention of Zionism was not to bring
democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in
Eretz-Isrel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the
Jewish people alone. This is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to
immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel."- Ariel
Sharon, May 28, 1993 edition of Yedioth Ahronoth.

On July 27, 2007, during the last day of my fifth out of seven trips to Israel
Palestine, Mikhael Manekin, informed this reporter:

"I am a practicing Jew and in two weeks
we go into the month of repentance; which requires acknowledging our sins. We
cannot change things until we acknowledge our culpability.

"The problem is government policy that
is implemented by young soldiers and whenever religion is involved, we will
have fundamentalism. The Israeli peace and justice activists are less than 1%
of Israeli society and anybody who is an activist is an optimist. You cannot do
anything if you do not believe you can do something to change the situation. We
have to remind ourselves that we are the minority; [it appears that] we are
loosing, but we remind ourselves we are right!

"Everybody in Israel knows somebody who
has served in the occupied territories. The situation in 2007 is worse than
2006 and it looks worse for 2008, but more and more activists-like Anarchists
Against the Wall and Tayoush are actively working with Palestinians against the
occupation, they are not afraid to travel in the occupied territories and are
learning Arabic. Two, three years ago you wouldn't have heard anything; but now
every week Israelis are getting arrested for fighting the occupation.

"A few years ago, the soldiers you have
encountered at the checkpoints would have been me. Soldiers like myself who
served during the second intifada, got our education on the job. You all have
visited more places [the past nine days] than most Israelis ever have.
Israeli's have no idea what is happening in the occupied territories. But, so
far in 2007 we have given more Israeli's a tour through Hebron than we did in
2005 and 2006 combined. Hebron is a ghost town, the settlers are unbearable and
every soldier who is stationed there understands the 600 settlers there are
psychotic; insane.

"I became very opinionated while in the
army, but I kept it all to myself. Nobody talks about it in the army and I was
the commander and did not know until after I got out that one of the other
soldiers in my unit was feeling the same way, until he gave his testimony.
Israeli society wants you to believe you are a bad apple for speaking out
because unless you trust the system, it will fall apart. Most Israelis who get
out of the army leave the country and are probably all drugged out. They suffer
post traumatic syndrome but we are the victimizers. My age group is getting the
hell out of here or walling themselves off from society and are not involved in
anything.

"Over 450 former soldiers have now
given their testimonies and we don't publish any stories without the
corroboration coming from another former soldier and the testimonies are kept
anonymous.

"You have to understand you must preach
to your own people; we want to shake up the comfortable people who may agree
with us in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but are not activists yet."

Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com
Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish
American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory" Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with
Vanunu"

RELATED:

December
20, 2009: Twelve Days of Christmas and an Open Letter to The House

"HOPE has two children.The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it."-St. Augustine

"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Aquinas

Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

" In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."-Mother Teresa

“You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life.”- Lewis Mumford, 1946

The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." - William Fulbright

“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. MLK

Establishment of Israel

"On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations." - May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel